Charles Wallace

‘Some Stated Employment of Your Mind’: Reading, Writing, and Religion in the Life of Susanna Wesley

Susanna Wesley (1669–1742) was raised a Dissenter, converted to Anglicanism as an adolescent, and arguably spent the last three years of her life as a Methodist. Moreover, these three modes of English Protestantism were neatly embodied respectively in three generations of clergymen to whom she was closely related: her father, the Presbyterian divine Samuel Annesley; her husband, Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth; and her sons John and Charles, leaders of the Methodist revival. Yet she was not dominated either by the men closest to her or the patriarchically inclined religious traditions they served.